Top Headline Comments 10-24-12

Happy Wednesday.

Last night, news broke that the White House was informed that Ansar al Sharia had taken credit for the Benghazi attack just hours after it happened. ICYMI, Ace had a post on it.

Bob Woodward has offered a sort-of explanation for why Obama might not have known that the idea for sequestration originated with the White House and not Congress, as Obama fatuously claimed at Monday's debate.

According to Woodward, "maybe [Obama] didn’t know that they were doing this because it’s kind of technical budget jargon." But that's stupid. Federal budgeting is technical and so are the details of the sequestration cuts, but the source of the idea of sequestration cuts isn't technical. It involves no jargon, no math, no obscure Congressional knowledge, nothing other than one or two or, at most, three names for the guys who proposed the idea. On the other hand, I think it's fantastic that Woodward is trying to protect the President by saying he's too stupid to understand budgets. Boy, wouldn't that explain a lot?

And the editor of the Des Moines Register, which I expect will endorse President Obama soon, is lodging a protest of sorts over the Obama campaign's inexplicable decision to require that the paper report nothing, record nothing, reveal nothing about their thirty-minute phone call with the President. As someone put it on Twitter, Obama has finally started talking to the press again, but only on condition that the press won't report on it.

Now at the end of the last campaign of his life, Obama is squirming like a worm on a hook. Even if Obama manages to win in two weeks, students of political science will study the failure of Obama's negative campaign for decades. The old conventional wisdom -- negative campaigning works -- is going to need a major revision.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 06:51 AM

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